Looking to the future with SAM

From Computing Bits, January 2015

Robert Illingworth (left) and Stephen White (right), the two members of the SAM team who worked on transitioning SAM’s database from Oracle to PostgreSQL under Project Manager Steve Jones (not pictured).

Clementine Jones

Many who work closely with the experiments at the lab will be familiar with SAM, the data-handling system originally designed for the DZero experiment and still in use today as the system of choice for 13 Fermilab experiments, with two more currently being added. Continuity is a great advantage: many users are well-acquainted with SAM’s operations and conversant in any particular features. However, it is not surprising that the requirements of the 1990s, when the system was designed, or the 2000s, when it was updated, are not precisely those of the 2010s. Therefore, in early 2014, members of the Data Management and Applications group, including Michael Diesburg, Michael Gheith, Robert Illingworth, Arthur Kreymer, Marc Mengel and Stephen White, started a project to update SAM for the new experiments.